


we'll rise up from the dust and claim our throne

by eynn



Series: i can't go back and lose it all [30]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, ahsoka!vader, she is doing her best but she is bad at being a sith like sidious wanted, sith!jedi order, uhh that's it, with a baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27505558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: The legs had been designed for menace, not repetitive pacing, she is discovering. Menace was very useful, and sometimes lifesaving, but she’s been circling her bedroom for three hours now, the quietly wailing child in the crook of her cold metal arm, and the muscles that aren’t there anymore are starting to cramp.She bounces it, feeling helpless (which she does not like) and tries to hum, but it comes out as a raspy growl through the life support suit.
Series: i can't go back and lose it all [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658362
Comments: 22
Kudos: 337





	we'll rise up from the dust and claim our throne

The legs had been designed for menace, not repetitive pacing, she is discovering. Menace was very useful, and sometimes lifesaving, but she’s been circling her bedroom for three hours now, the quietly wailing child in the crook of her cold metal arm, and the muscles that aren’t there anymore are starting to cramp.

She bounces it, feeling helpless (which she does not like) and tries to hum, but it comes out as a raspy growl through the life support suit.

The baby stops sobbing and blinks at her, hazy eyes full of curiosity.

Vader growls again, this time purposefully and playfully. The nearly-newborn makes a thin, high-pitched attempt to growl back.

 _I can work with this,_ she thinks, and finally manages to sit down without the kid bursting into nearly-silent tears for the first time in what feels like her entire life.

She doesn’t like how such a young child already knows to be so quiet, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. She’s in charge, not the nurse droid or whoever else was looking after it, and she’s going to look after her new little master with care and determination.

“I’m going to make sure you have an excellent Empire when you are old enough to take the throne,” she rumbles as the baby finally drifts off to sleep, resisting an urge to poke its little nose gently with a finger. “Large, well-off, under control. Good officers. The best advisors and council I can find. A loyal army. It’s what your father would have done for you, if he’d lived.”

She sighs, wondering if the baby had ever even spent time with its father. The Jedi scum had cut him down so quickly, leaving this little one, his only heir, in her care.

At least, she’s assuming the child is his heir. He hadn’t mentioned it, as such, but she’d found it in the most heavily guarded part of their hideout; it had been strongly protected and obvious care had gone into producing it in the first place. And most importantly, it had been where she had had orders to go and grab the emergency supplies, should he ever been badly hurt or they be discovered and forced to flee.

Funny that their hideout had been under the Senate building, where so many of the Jedi came and went all the time. But his strategy for hiding must have been sound. Right up until it wasn’t, he was careless, and her grand march on the Temple had been cut short by his death.

“I wish he’d told me your name,” she laments, looking down at the sleeping infant. It’s cute enough, with dark hair and dark eyes and round cheeks even though it’s a little too skinny for her liking.

A good hunting will fix that soon enough – she’d feed it herself if she could, but she’s stuck in the suit. A new nurse droid will have to be found, since she’d accidentally cut down the original one in her haste to gather up the baby’s things along with the datachips and holocrons she’d been instructed to take with her. It had been in the way.

Tarkin is out looking for a new one, and if he doesn’t come back with the best for the child Emperor, she’ll have his head.

“I suppose I could just call you R3,” she says. “You had an identification bracelet on your wrist when I first picked you up and that’s what it said. That seems more like a name for a droid than a baby, though. Maybe it was put there by the nurse droid?”

 _Or a name for an experiment,_ a small, irritating voice in the back of her mind whispers. She ruthlessly blocks it off.

This tiny person asleep in her arm must be her new Master. There’s no other explanation. Why else would Master Sidious have had a child in his hideout? And such a strong child at that – her Force-presence is turbulent and blinding even when they’re calm.

“Oh, I know,” she says, very carefully standing up and inching over to her bed. “He must have rescued you from the Jedi just like he rescued me!”

That makes a lot of sense, considering the contents of the room she’d found it in. It must have been injured when he rescued it – why else would a child need to be kept in a tank and hooked up to all those needles?

It vaguely comes to her tired mind that she’s seen something like that before, but she reaches her bed and lifts herself into it without waking the child and is asleep before the mechanics whirr to raise her up to sitting so that she doesn’t asphyxiate in her sleep from the damage done to her lungs.

~

After a tense few hours of telling the idiot engineers exactly what she wants modified on her suit, Vader strides onto the bridge of the Emperor’s flagship. The Emperor is drooling as they chew toothlessly on a rubber lightsaber. It’s red, of course.

Vader will not sully the memory of Master Sidious by giving his heir a Jedi toy.

The admirals waiting for her stand to attention.

“What,” she barks, seeing several of them side-eye her.

“The – ah, the child –” says one particularly stupid one, pointing at the Emperor.

Vader looks down to check on them as they snuggle into the soft covering of the chest panel on her suit, safely supported in the armored black baby carrier she’s had attached. It has cortosis woven into the inner shell and is plated in beskar. It can fully close and pressurize in seconds, and is capable of acting as an emergency escape pod if it really needs to. And of course, she is also fastened to it as the most effective defense. Nothing is going to hurt the Emperor. Not this time.

“ – perhaps not the place –” the idiot is saying. She shuts up him by dangling him over the table by his throat.

“If anyone else has a problem with Emperor Ret being here, I advise them to get out,” she says flatly, letting the man go as he turns blue around the mouth. He falls on the table and rolls off of it, and nobody dares to move to check on him as she slowly sweeps the room with her gaze.

“The Emperor has been named?” says Tarkin.

She senses no immediate malice towards the baby from him, so she lets him breathe. But he’s on thin fucking ice, and only the fact that he did bring back a top-of-the-line nurse droid, and quickly, keeps her from going to loom over him and draw her lightsabers.

“Their name was chosen by Emperor Sidious,” she hisses, which is delightfully easy to do now. “You will show his heir the appropriate respect.”

It’s (mostly) not a lie. The R3 on the bracelet was probably an incompetent attempt to write the baby’s name by the nurse droid. Ret is a good strong name, the name of a leader. Her memory of why that is so is fuzzy, but it’s something she’s sure of. Of all the names beginning with the ‘re’ sound, it’s the most likely to have been the one Master Sidious picked.

She’d almost gone with ‘Res’, but that just hadn’t felt right. It felt vaguely rude to name someone after another person, even if she couldn’t quite remember who or where the person was.

“This . . . heir,” Tarkin begins to say. The ice creaks.

Vader ignites one of her sabers.

“I had heard nothing from the Emperor about an heir,” he continues, eyeing her warily.

“Why should you?” she growls.

Tarkin blinks rapidly. “I’m an Admiral of –”

“And I’m his apprentice. Your job is commanding a part of the army in his name, _Admiral_. You are not entitled to information that does not pertain to that. And Ret is the Emperor now.” She points her free hand at the baby on her chest. “I am merely the regent until they are old enough to govern.”

She slashes her saber through the table in front of her, and watches in satisfaction as the eyes that had lit with a greedy gleam and the minds that had sparked with thoughts of treason cower away.

“They will reach that age with or without your help. I will make sure of it. And they will have a long and glorious rule. Your actions now will greatly affect your position then.” Behind her mask, she bares her teeth even as the ruined skin of her face protests. “You thought that because Lord Sidious was murdered, you could aspire to take his place? You fools. I will honor his wishes and his memory. I am loyal. Can I think the same of any of you?”

She points around the room with her saber and relishes in the fear of those closest to her, who have to leap out of the way before being cut down by the glowing blade. “I could kill you all right now,” she purrs, and the suit adds a delightful bass growl. “You are only cogs, easily replaced. All of you are tainted with some remnant of the failed Republic or the rogue Separatists. Give me any reason why I should not purge you from the system and start fresh.”

“We have knowledge that cannot be –” one starts.

“Wrong,” she says, pinning him to the wall with her eyes and a wave of her hand. “Everything is recorded. Everything. I could replace you all with droids. I could order an improved batch of clones from the Kaminoans and load your skills and knowledge straight into their heads from birth.”

Tarkin shifts slightly. “I apologize for my temporary confusion, Lord Vader. It will not happen again.”

Vader eyes him. He’s sincere for now, the bastard, but she still needs to cement Master Ret’s position as the authority here, not herself. But she will start from this foundation; Tarkin’s weak point has always been his need for security.

“Apology accepted, High Admiral Tarkin. Do not let yourself lapse again. Instruct the payroll department to backdate your promotion from the day Lord Sidious was murdered.”

She knows she’s made the right decision when Tarkin fairly radiates smugness and satisfaction even to a Force-null and the other officers almost go out of focus with the force of their envy, even the one still twitching on the floor.

“Lord Ret shall need to build a court when they are older. I suggest that you begin looking for suitable candidates right away. All will be vetted by me and any hint of disloyalty shall be . . . terminally discouraged. This meeting is over. Dismissed.”

Vader sweeps out of the room without looking back, the Emperor still quietly gumming their toy lightsaber.

“Don’t worry, kid,” she says silently. “Ba’vodu Vader will take care of you.”

~

Vader doesn’t dream often; the medications she has to constantly be fed through her suit to keep her heart and lungs working inhibit them and disrupt her sleep. But she dreams tonight.

Baby Ret’s hair is blond, and their tunic bears the symbol of the fallen Republic.

Vader’s sabers are white as she teaches the child to fight, and they are laughing uninhibited by the suit.

Ret runs away from her as the lesson ends, to someone vaguely familiar and comforting, like quiet laughter by a campfire or a soft shoulder to sleep on. Arms encircle Vader herself, familiar and unfamiliar at the same times, two bodies pressing on her from either side but not a threat.

The baby’s hair is dark again and glitters with jewels like stars. They glide across the floor with predatory grace, like a young queen. From the side, her Master watches, a small smile quirking up one side of his mouth and a faraway look in his eyes.

Rows upon rows of children in tanks, surrounded in needles and tubes, but the walls are white and she spins to put her back to them, raising her red sabers to defend them but the red bleeds out and they become white again.

Ret is back, grown and blue and white to match her montrals, backing her up with blaster fire as they gain ground on their enemies.

Vader jerks awake and reaches for her sabers. They flare red in the dark room and she relaxes a little.

 _Stupid dream,_ she thinks, and makes a note to tell the med droid to adjust her medication.

“What a fine Emperor you will make,” she murmurs as she gets up to check on the baby, who sleeps in her new armored cradle right beside her bed. “Just as beautiful as your mother, and even more powerful.”

She pauses, frowns; who is the baby’s mother? Why did she say that?

They’re too young to have any real resemblance to anyone. Perhaps she is sensing a connection in the Force? But the child sleeps, waves of drowsiness coming from them, and Vader lies down again.

It doesn’t matter who the child’s mother is. They are the Emperor, her Master’s heir. Nothing will change that.

Vader will do anything to keep them safe.

**Author's Note:**

> sooo you might have guessed it already, but ret is not an oc, they're a canon character (though i've tweaked their actual origin just a bit about who donated genes to make them because i didn't like canon)
> 
> canon is ball of yarn and i am a cat high on catnip re timelines
> 
> also someone in a comment a while back suggested 'ret' as rex's original name, and though i've already given him one, i've decided that after the kaminoans made him and the rest forget their names, he picked ret, and it got shifted into rex as he started working with more people who didn't speak mando'a. so that is a thing in this au, and ahsoka knows it . . .


End file.
